Guild Wars 2

I guess what I was getting at was the main thing that stops healing classes from being viable in dungeons/fractals, is that they need to be adding both healing and supporting group DPS for them to be contributing enough to take the place of a DPS build.

Druid is the only healing build that contributes to group DPS and also heals (with Grace of the Land), and although other healing builds are useful in the ways people have mentioned, the problem is that if the group isn’t taking a lot of damage and you have one of those healing builds, then the contribution of your build isn’t going to be that high.

maxwelgm.4315:

The real issue is deeper than individual classes but in the very way combat works; it is heavily action oriented so you never have to wait for your turn or count on some evasion stat to not take damage. You either press that evade/block/invulnerability button or you don’t, and the game heavily decentivizes you to ever actually take a hit (again, except for raids and couple other areas, with green circles and all that). This result in a clear and easy message to all players: defense is a matter of only skill and damage is a matter of both skill and equipment, so you should only equip yourself for offense, obviously.

This is a good point and I was thinking of adding this point to my OP and you summed it up well in the last sentence. Perhaps future fights could change from a small number of big impact attacks that are delivered by one big boss; that have to be avoided. To a larger number of less damaging attacks delivered by a larger number of small foes, who could be supporting the main boss. This way you would find it very hard to avoid all attacks, as you wouldn’t have a block/evade for every attack, and so would take some of these smaller hits on the chin. This is where the healer would find a role, as they could get peoples health back up after they take that damage.

If you are thinking of what types of build are useful in a group, the first, and pretty much only thought seems to be how much damage can they deal, or perhaps how much damage can they contribute to the party through a combination of their damage, and the damage they help others deal through traits such as Phalanx Strength.

Either way the offensive stats have dominated. To me it seems the reason for this is that if you invest in damage stats everyone in the group benefits from the targets going down faster, but if you invest in defensive stats, they only stop you from going down faster. I think this is at the heart of it and because of that it would be hard to change things so that vitality and toughness enter the mata.

Healing power though has the potential for much more use in fractals and raids as it can benefit not just the person with the stat but as with damage; everyone in the group.

I’m more familiar with fractals but it seems at the moment only the Ranger as a Druid does well with healing power. This is because of Grace of the Land not only heals but adds damage to the group. I think for healing builds to compete for entry into competitive groups in the place of a DPS dealer, then they will all need a way of contributing damage at the same time as healing, in much the same way as Grace of the Land has allowed the Druid to.

I see alacrity has been added to the Revenant’s tablet after investing in the Salvation trait line. This seems like the direction I was thinking of, but at the moment it is only one skill and that makes it a little narrow compared to Grace of the Land.

Guardians could add some damage as they heal, as could Elementalists, although part of their problem is as they heal they often leave their preferred attunement to enter water, and then can’t move back into it and therefore suffer a DPS drop.

I would like to see other professions enter competitive groups with healing power, and I think if they could add damage support as they healed as well as maybe some more offensive healing power stat combinations such as healing power/precision/condition damage ect. then this could happen, although I know introducing new stat combinations is complicated.

What do you lot think?

This bug is still with us, and I suspect casual players who play open world probably don’t realise that this is not working, and just find that their build isn’t working as well as before, as their pet is slower and dies faster due to lack of regeneration or toughness from the signets.

Should have high priority for a fix in my opinion.

Not a massive change I know, but often people compete for the killing blow on the two AI bosses on the Forest of Nifhel, as its the person who delivers the killing blow that gets the 25 points for their team. So it would be good to see name of the winner coming up on the kill spam on the right hand side of the screen, like it does for kills between players.

At the moment path of scars pulls targets on the way back but this feels uncomfortable, as if a target is moving across your path, you will only hit them with the fist hit and they will have moved before it pulls them on the return. It also means that if you take the associated trait, you will have to wait longer for the skill to pull, as the axe will be going further out due to the increase in range.

I think the solution would be to add a small push to the axe on the way out, that would send the target slightly away from the ranger, so that it will keep the target in place so the axe will also pull on the way back.

I know its a buff, but the offhand axe is weak right now.

This bug still exists and has a big impact on signet builds – would be good to have a fix.

Since the update on the 14th April the signet passive effects have not applied to ranger pets properly after switching pets. It seems to be that the passive is being give out for 10 seconds at 10 second intervals to the pets, but if a pet is switched out after 3 seconds of the effect, the incoming pet wont get the passive effect for another 7 seconds, when the next interval arrives.

Thanks.

Do people agree that those are the problems?

Does anyone have any other solutions?

There are three things I think could help with this.

Firstly, the gap closing skills such as Icy Pounce (without the chill) or Haunt (in my dreams) could be on the list of the cooldown skills that are used by the AI, and could be triggered for use by the AI when a target is a certain distance away – although I have no idea how hard that would be to code.

Secondly, as I wrote about before a lot of the passive AI controlled skills are worse than the auto attack in PvP and the pets would be better off without them.

The third solution would work like this; think how Sigil of Fire triggers every 5 seconds, this causes a mini spike and would work most efficiently in situations such as when your target goes in and out of stealth or cover, where you can’t hit them for 5 seconds, then you can and it triggers, then you can’t for 5 seconds, then you can again and it triggers. Now, pets are too slow for PvP even if they have the 30% speed increase from the trait, so they have gaps between their hits all the time. If they had their auto attack damage lowered and if the attacks controlled by the AI that have a cooldown had their damage increased significantly, this would result in the same damage output over time, such as in PvE situations where mostly stationary targets are being hit, but would have the same effect as the sigil when gaps are left between their attacks. This would give people something to remember, as well as helping them to keep up damage wise in PvP.

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think.

So I’ve been fantasizing about animals; you know…thinking about how great they could be as pets in this game. At the moment they are in my opinion the weakest aspect of balance.

Problem 1 - The pets have been left behind

They have been left behind in two ways.

Firstly, they haven’t been balanced significantly since launch.

Secondly, as players learn the game and their skill levels increase the aspects of the game that involve skill will become more efficiently utilized, therefore becoming in a sense (although not inherently) more powerful. As player interaction with pets is so minimal, the skill aspect is so small that they get very little benefit from this increase in player skill since launch. In other words the AI never learns so it’s as good in the hands of a newbie, as it is in a veteran’s. I understand that the developers don’t want to make the pets too complicated, but I think they could move closer to a middle ground between too complicated and too simple. It’s a problem regardless.

Problem 2 - The pets don’t leave an impression on the fight

Here are a some quotes I can’t imagine someone use as they reflect on a fight they just had, unless they were writing a book about it:

“and then my sigil triggered”

“then I applied a stack of bleeding”

and most tellingly…

“and then my pet auto attacked them”

So those above things are the forgettable parts of combat and unfortunately almost everything pets do falls into this category, even the F2 skills.

Here are quotes you might hear:

“then I immobilized them to stop them getting into melee range”

“I was doing a load of damage but then got knocked back”

“I had to move back as I could see the Churning Earth he was channelling was about to end”

So we need the pets doing things like the second set of quotes rather than the first.

Unfortunately it’s harder to be imaginative with the rangers pets as they are mostly realistic-ish animals (teleporting dogs?) than with the necromancer’s undead minions. This would be more for an expansion pack, when perhaps more mythical pets could be added, but here are some existing skills that have the effect on the combat that F2s should have.

Pull - but shorter range and not unavoidable

Magnetic Inversion

Smoke Bomb

Net Attack

Muddy Terrain

Blinding Powder - but without the blind

Churning Earth - with smaller radius and less damage

Unsteady Ground

Swirling Winds - with smaller radius

Haunt - but no blind

Problem 3 - Pets are too slow moving for PvP

The third and final problem is in the first reply.

LughLongArm.5460:

@Arkanakaz
Hi, very interesting(and depressing) findings.
Do you think this post should be moved\copied to “Profession Balance” forum?

Could be. I chose here becuse I thought ranger players might find it more interesting.

It is true as some have said that rangers can use this rune as well, but as has been said this rune pet can be used more efficiently by other classes as they aren’t designed with pets in mind:

Knocklock warrior to keep your enemy in place as the bird DPSes

Venom share

Mesmers and thiefs in the safty of stelth as the bird does the damage

Longer snares (immobolize, cripple ect.)

and so on…

warriorjrd.8695:

I’ve also never heard of these built in evades, if that’s true it’s really mind boggling why ranger’s don’t have pets with that same function, considering we’ve been asking for something like that for years.

Those are pritty much the averages – it dosen’t change much when the time to kill is as long as 20 seconds.

As for the evasion thing…

Rune of the Pirate bird taking 22 seconds to take out test golem:

.

Untraited pet bird taking 24 seconds to take out test golem:

.

Rune of the pirate has 100% up time unless it is killed, as it has a 60 second duration and a 60 second cooldown on the summon as well as having some built in evasion.

JonPeters.5630:

AN UPDATE
Weakening Shroud. This trait now does a smaller version of Enfeebling Blood when entering Death Shroud. Bleeding (1 stack only; 6 seconds [10s with full condition duration spec]). Weakness (2s [3s with full condition duration spec]). No ICD.

Obviously this is a very big change so please discuss, and keep your discussion constructive, so that we can actually talk through the merits/downsides.

Jon

I see the general aim here is to reduce the number of times the Necromancer can reapply long bleeds to a target, so that they don’t apply more than the condition removal effects remove, to such an extent – and I agree with that.

But currently I enjoy using the weakening shroud as it can be easily used in combination with other skills as it has no cast time. I do think though as it stands, it is overpowered, but I would prefer it that it lost it’s bleeds altogether and got something else instead, while maintaining the weakness duration that it currently has to justify its name and original role (lowering attack damage).

So maybe remove the cool down and swap the bleeds for something like vulnerability stacks or a short immobilize. Maybe it could be moved into master or grandmaster if this is considered too powerful, but I would like it if it was still good enough to make it worth weaving into a play style, rather than have it as something that is so small of a benefit that its not worth thinking about during play.

It will be interesting to see what will be different for the ranger weapons.

I hope that the there will be come movement impairing effects added to help the rangers pets land their attacks, ideally at the expense of rangers natural (base) vitality/thoroughness which could come down to be honest.

If you want to know what I think about the ranger pet skills click below

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/PvP-could-do-without-some-pet-skills/first#post2760554

Also I hope its not too cheeky to add but I saw on some allegedly leaked patch notes that the ’Companion’s Defence’ trait (protection on dodge roll ranger), will now apply protection at the end of the dodge roll. If this is also applied to the pet at the end of the dodge roll, wont this prevent people from using this trait to apply protection to their pet on reaction to an imminent attack in, say PvE? As of course there would be a delay as the dodge roll was being completed, this would no longer be possible.

So the suggestion is to disable some of the purely AI controlled skills (hidden ones that can’t be controlled – not the F2s) in PvP situations and keep them just for PvE play.

I think that the skills listed below are better used only in PvE, and their existence in PvP causes the pets to use them, and due to the constantly moving and intelligent opponents that constitute PvP, this is almost never a good thing. If they were disabled I think the familys of pets to which theses skills belong to would be more common and useful in PvP play.

So here are the ones I think should go:

Ursine

Brutal Charge

Activation time is too long and it does not track targets.

Devourer

Devourer Retreat

Currently is used when ever an enemy enters melee range causing the devourer to stop attacking for some time and often results in the pet being out of position. It would be useful if it was only used when the devourer was taking a lot of damage.

Drake

Tail Swipe

Activation time is too long enemies just move out of range when they would have been hit by the auto attack.

Moa

Frenzied Attack

The moa stand still as it attacks and also pauses before attacking requiring the target to stand still to be hit.

Spider

Poison Gas

Requires the target to be stationary for some time for the spider to do more damage than it would had if it had been using its auto attack.

Anyone have a view on this?

Some AI controlled pet skills are not useful in PvP for various reasons. Mostly because they have too long of an activation time or require the target to stand still for some time to be effective.

I think it would be better if some of these skills were disabled in WvW and sPvP as they are best used in PvE by the pet. The disadvantage to the families that have these skills lowers their utility in PvP, form the starting point of the more balanced PvE. Disabling these in PvP would raise the utility of the pets and result in a balance that is closer to better PvE levels.

Here is my opinion of the ones that are not useful in the fast moving environment of PvP:

Ursine

Brutal Charge

Activation time is too long and it does not track targets.

Devourer

Devourer Retreat

Currently is used when ever an enemy enters melee range causing the devourer to stop attacking for some time and often results in the pet being out of position. It would be useful if it was only used when the devourer was taking a lot of damage.

Drake

Tail Swipe

Activation time is too long enemies just move out of range when they would have been hit by the auto attack.

Moa

Frenzied Attack

The moa stand still as it attacks and also pauses before attacking requiring the target to stand still to be hit.

Spider

Poison Gas

Requires the target to be stationary for some time for the spider to do more damage than it would had if it had been using its auto attack.

I forgot to mention before, but really the cooldown on signet of stone could be altered as an alternative to pet dodging.

At the moment it gives 6 seconds of invulnerability but has a cooldown of 120 seconds. It could be get say, 40 seconds cooldown but 3 seconds of invulnerability. I believe that it is instant cast at the moment and could be used as another way of allowing people to have the invulnerability effect of a doge.

I think its interesting the idea of having them do an evasion move every time you recall them to yourself when you are in combat. Each family of pet could have their own skill. For example the Devourer family could use the ‘Devourer Retreat’ (tunneling skill) as soon as you recall them, and perhaps birds could fly above combat in the way flying AI enemies sometimes do.

Before I start I’d like to honestly say how much better in general balance is in this game in comparison to others I have played and since I have looked through some of the dev posts I can see why, as they seem to play the game and think through the balance carefully.

I think pets dying too fast against bosses designed to combat multiple players is a problem that would be best solved by altering traits in the beastmastery line, or other lines that aren’t useful at the moment. I think this would fit in better with the existing game better than some of the other suggestions.

For example a trait that would give all pets the “Defy Pain” skill (allowing you pet to take no damage for 5 seconds) that is currently exclusive to the bears. If this was used cleverly by the pet (I don’t know if this is doable) the “Defy Pain” would be activated just before the pet takes a huge single hit or if lets say it looses more than 50% of its health over the course of say 0.3 seconds. This would mean that the lower health pets could fight without getting almost instantly killed but wouldn’t have the drawback of simply increasing the vitality/toughness of pets which as was said by Robert would make them too powerful in open world (as it wouldn’t activate when fighting enemies that deal moderate damage over time) and due to its cooldown would mean that it couldn’t be used to tank bosses over time as it would only give a second chance but not a third.

Lastly if that did ever happen it would be good to get some sign that “Defy pain” or whatever it would be, had been activated so that people could pull their pets out or become more cautious.

Or if that is too much just give or change an existing trait so pets get distortion as soon as you call their special ability’s (F2s) – this could be used as this dodge people are talking about.

Thanks for reading (if you did)

Esplen.3940:

It also changes the color of your face, arms, torso, and legs.

I agree, I just feel that seeing as the glow influences hair color it should be included in this kit.

Esplen.3940:

The Sylvari glow is a body feature, similar to Asuran ears. It is part of the face, however, a self-style hair kit is for the hair alone.

But if the glow changes the color of the hair, as it surly does in the dark – then a hair kit that says it can change the color of the hair should be able to change that then.

So I have a ‘Self style hair kit’ but the reason I got it was I wanted to change the amount of glow of my Sylvari’s hair. The option isn’t available though, although before you buy it, it claims to allow you to alter hair color.

Is it possible that this could be made available?